Ross William Hamilton/The OregonianLabor Commissioner Brad Avakian and state Sen. Suzanne Bonamici listen to Rep. Brad Witt as the three Democrats debate at the City Club of Portland last Friday.

In her congressional race, Oregon state Sen. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Beaverton, frequently mentions that she showed her political negotiating skills when she helped broker an agreement this year to redraw Oregon's legislative district lines to account for population changes.

It was the first time since 1981 that the Legislature was able to come up with a successful plan to redraw its own districts (and in 1981, the secretary of state had to redo some of the work after some of it was thrown out in court). Bonamici, as chairman of the Senate Redistricting Committee, cut the deal with her vice-chairwoman, Sen. Chris Telfer, R-Bend, and the two House redistricting co-chairmen, Reps. Chris Garrett, D-Lake Oswego, and Shawn Lindsay, R-Hillsboro.

But Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian, who is also running in the Democratic congressional primary, scoffed at that achievement in a meeting with the The Oregonian's editorial board on Monday:

"I want to give her a lot of credit for some of the successes that she's had. But the truth is on that example, for instance, of redistricting, people were brought together there because they didn't want it in Kate Brown's lap. That was the driving force. It wasn't the miraculous bringing together of divisive groups to compromise. There was a huge threat out there from a Democratic state official."

It's true that Kate Brown, the secretary of state, was in line to redraw the district lines if Democrats and Republicans could not agree on a redistricting plan. And Republicans openly acknowledged during the session that they were willing to accept a less-than-optimal plan to keep it out of the Democratic secretary of state's hands.

But Bonamici, in her own appearance before the editorial board on Tuesday, implied that Avakian's intepretation was too simplistic:

"That was a lot of work and it wasn't necessarily a fear of Kate Brown. There were a lot of factors at play...Everywhere we went, people said, 'This is your responsibility in the Legislature to get it done. Do not send it to the secretary of state. Do not send it to the courts.' We heard that again and again...I don't think it was necessarily a fear of Kate Brown. I think it was a commitment that we had to spend that time getting testimony, to sitting down and talking about where we could draw the lines, and how we could draw the lines and what could be a package that we believed was fair...There was also a ballot measure that was being discussed that Kevin Mannix was working on to redo all of the work in 2013. So we really made a commitment to getting the work done."